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Abstract

One is moved when reading the novel Crime and Punishment. Its an emotional experience, that one cannot help become part of. It is with this voice that classical novels are able to achieve an understanding of aspects of the human condition. This phenomenon with the body and the eyes, one is imbued with a sense of moral dilemma. Succeeding, I became upset. Why does anybody have to confess? Feodor Dostoevsky needed a challenge. The hero, Radion Ramanovich Raskolnikov, commits a crime and is free and clear throughout his enthrallment. When circumstantial evidence is clearly to his advantage, and no moral grounds are able to be shaken, why doesn’t the character just play detective and continue a life without being ramshackled by anxieties? The puzzle in Crime and Punishment, is that God seems to be written out of the picture altogether. State rationalism, discipline, experiences learned since birth and deeply embedded in ones personality is atrophied.

Dostoevsky seems to retain the claim that nature is good, but not because of having been authored in by God, or the design of man and his state. Dostoevsky is describing a purely naturalistic order in nature which is good. Through the experience of conscience, nature itself, absent divine creation and state interventions, reveals this goodness found within nature. On the one side, the author is trying this different approach to moral thinking; he is driving the bus between state rationalism, rained condition; on the other side, transcendence from the command of Christ consciences. Dostoevsky is taking the middle road and is trying to articulate a conception of moral law which is underdeveloped.

He spent time in the Gulag, so he is worried about the state rationalism, the Czar and his powers that threw the hero of the novel. He is worried about the regime, which is still ordered under the old orthodoxy. Like religion, basically at the same time, there is this Frankofile movement. People like Marx and Engels are being imported into Russia, thinkers like Saint-Simon and Schiller are writers who begin to appear in the press. A lot more authors of distinction begin to appear at this time. They start pushing into the direction of state rationalism. That is where Dostoyevsky finds himself – neither Orthodoxy nor state rationalism under all these circumstances. How do we account for this central fact of human nature?

There is a conscience, and I am trying to articulate human nature reintegrating without theological and rationalistic foundations. I have teased out the axe, the light and the growth. I think this novel by a genius of the first order is very effective as a narrative argument in investigating why Radion Ramanovich Raskolnikov confessed and removes the burden from the reader of having psychological distress.

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